Free We Ate the Road Like Vultures by Lynnette Lounsbury Page B

give it away if it is your money?’
    â€˜I breed cattle. And when you are twelve you have to have a parent’s signature to invest money.’ I looked at him smugly for a moment, remembered who I was speaking to, and put my head back down. A thick knot of hair hung in my eyeline with a burr that tangled up and around most of the right half of my head, and I had a strange feeling that I would never brush my long hair again. My hair hadn’t been cut in five years and was the only part of my appearance that I spent any time on at all, by that I mean I washed it and conditioned it and brushed it every day, something that took about thirty minutes of mytime and used up everything I could emotionally allocate to my body without being disgusted with myself. I knew my hair was fucked.
    â€˜Perhaps you deserve to lose your money.’ He smiled at me again, that horrible tiny slit.
    â€˜I’ll make more.’
    â€˜Whoring yourself in my jail?’ Same smile.
    â€˜Somehow.’
    Carousel coughed, either a signal to me to shut the hell up or remind the captain of some previous conversation, cos he watched me only a moment longer then sat up.
    â€˜You are too much of a bother for me, Lulu —I don’t need you in my jail to be found one day by the American press. And Carousel has offered me his own bounty on your head, which happens to be more generous that your little trust fund anyway. So you are free to get the fuck out of my jail, town and country in the next two days, or I will shoot you in the back of the head and throw you to the coyotes.’ He stood up and left the room. I turned immediately to Carousel.
    â€˜Adolf?’
    â€˜Local doctor took him in, they may have to fly him to Tijuana yet. Internal injuries, mostly unconscious. Let’s get out of here before the captain changes his mind and shoots both of us.’
    â€˜You gave him that much money?’
    He smiled broadly. ‘I pay him almost that every year to keep my home ‘safe’. He’s Mexican. The rest of the world doesn’t intimidate him, it barely interests him. He’s the biggest shot in this part of the world and now he’s one of the richest. He can afford his desert philosophy and angst. He probably pocketed most of that bank heist as well.’
    Carousel led me by the arm through several identical corridors until we reached a final iron door and stepped out into the heat and dust and eye-roasting freedom. A beat-up yellow cab waited for us.
    â€˜Only cab in a thousand miles. He charges like a motherfucker.’ Carousel opened the door for me, slid in beside me and promptly fell asleep against the window, sun filling his wrinkles with gold and turning his hair into a wispy halo. Ileaned against his shoulder and fell asleep myself, happy to be shit-covered, bruised, virginal and free.

6
    Â 
    Â 
    There ain’t no road trip without a car that loves the road.
    Â 
    Â 
    I DIDN’T WAKE UP FOR LONGER THAN IT TOOK to stumble into the hacienda, swallow whatever pills a concerned Chicco thrust into my hands, and fall onto my filthy face into the huge bed. A second before I slept I noticed that someone had made it up with fresh sheets and I felt a moment of self-condemnation that I had ground such a variety of human effluence into their crispness. Then I slept. And slept for what must have been days of my life cos when I woke it was exactly the same time of day that I had fallen asleep, the bright holy glare of mid-morning—and yet, when I looked in the gilt-edged mirror that hung by the door, I was thirty years old, dirt in my sun wrinkles making them seem deeper than the shit I had just managed to crawl out of.
    I wobbled to the bathroom, making myself queasy with my own stench, and ran into Chicco on the way. He swore at me good-naturedly and gripped my shoulder with his gnarled hand. ‘Fuck me. You smell like the arse end of the devil.’ He held it a long while and